The new features are greatly appreciated, but I have noticed something which I have no idea whether it is simply an unavoidable consequence of these changes or a bug. Inputs of the kind "-LandingGear" no longer seem to work, having the same effect as "LandingGear" without the negative. I have only seen this behavior in beacon lights, so I don't know whether it's universal or simply a problem with the lights.
It's not a deal breaker for me since I only used these for cosmetics like landing gear lights and "LG down" warning lights in cockpits, but since this has the potential to affect a lot of previous builds I figured I should let people know, and see if someone else is also running into this problem. Of course, I'll be submitting a proper report too.
@ChiChiWerx Yeah, I am painfully aware. In this case the goal was to hit Mach 1 at sea level clean, and Mach 2 at altitude; the external tanks have drag modelled in (though I probably should have used more, since if I'm not mistaken 50% of the extra fuel they add is used just to overcome the extra drag), but you are correct, the weapons don't (except for the bombs, and the missile parts inside the missiles themselves, which probably don't count since they're hidden in a shell). The reason why is because I've had very bad experiences with custom weapons with drag, as in, it'd affect their performance after firing and sometimes render them unstable or otherwise useless. I choose to make all my custom weapons dragless due to that.
Thank you once again for your continued patience and extended feedback!
@Sunrising The reason are probably the detachers on the custom missiles. Low physics will probably cause them to go boom indeed.
Now, even on high physics, this plane can blow up because of that as I've found out, but that requires you to climb to 40.000 feet, accelerate to +1200 mph and then command full pitch + full roll.
And yeah controlling this on a mobile device must be painful, lol. I admit that didn't even go through my mind, as I only use mouse.
@ChiChiWerx Oh yeah, I'm not too happy with that myself. I wanted to make it decently controllable at low speed but we don't have vortex modellation so I ended up with too much lift, not enough AoA to bleed energy and a plane that turns way too hard at speed. I decided to leave it as is, but yeah, it turns too much. It's interesting to fly this limiting yourself to a point where the AoA warning lights don't turn on, though.
Balancing a degree of realism and fun to fly is something I really aim for, and every bit of feedback I can get is extremely valuable, thank you!
@NUOB Unfortunately I don't have any mobile device I can test this on. However, my laptop is a potato and it can run this with almost no problem. I'd be grateful if someone could test it out for mobile devices.
Handles like a dream, the cluster bombs are surprisingly fun to use and while they did lag my potato laptop a bit, it wasn't too much at all, even for this old 'tater! Absolutely magnificent build. I'm placing my chips on this one, haha
@wonkapilot Haha, it's got a heck ton of lift doesn't it? The real hard thing is landing this thing with an engine out, though. I did the "mission" I laid out there several times, in one of them the ships shot one of my engines out. I flew back home on a single engine, but when I was approaching for landing I went too slow and my rudder started losing authority. Desperate, I throttled up - and the asymmetric thrust sent me in a flatspin to the ocean, lol.
@BlyatMan It's included with the plane, it's the weird pod attached under the fuselage's centreline pylon. You can grab it and turn it into a subassembly by removing it from its pylon, just make sure to give credit if you use the pod itself in another build.
@sheepsblood I might have been the first, I don't know lol. In any case, I'd be really happy to see more people trying out systems like this one, it's really easy to do and fun to use.
@sheepsblood well, that's basically shat the Mehrzweckwaffe carried in German Tornados was... A bunch of very short-barreled, low-velocity guns shooting very unique shells, lel. Unfortunately, we cannot make these shells cylindrical and parachute-delayed, at least not just yet.
@XxMegamonsterxX Second time someone says that, but funny thing, I had to google what that meant, lmao. I'm an uncultured man, never read that book or any of the movies. I was trying to figure out how to make a Southern Cross (best constellation btw) reference without being too obvious. Guess I failed miserably lmao
@Mustang51 Is it? I figured someone must have already tried it lel, it was the first thing that came to mind when I was trying to figure out how to make a bomblet dispenser without needing 400 bomb parts lel.
There are some quirks to figure out, sometimes the explosions will send unexploded shells flying towards you, particularly in slow motion, and cause significant emotional events. Still, I found it pretty fun to mess around with and decided to share it, glad you liked it!
@Mitchellwi Yeah, it wasn't my intention to submit it into the challenge (as said in the first line of the description). This is based on the plane I submitted back then, and I forgot to erase the URL from the .xml file.
An unguided rocket with a scaled bomb that doesn't go haywire on launch? Man, I needed this in my life! My attempts to do something like this previously have all resulted in the rocket going absolutely bonkers as soon as it's fired.
This has got to be the best challenge I've participated in so far, and certainly the one with the highest quantity of amazing builds! I had a great deal of fun with this one, and the winners are indeed well deserved. That Martin Mauler caught my eye as soon as I saw it, man, those dive brakes.
@Zanedavid Thanks! Yeah, I should probably have set them a bit further apart, but look on the bright side - they're in front of the cockpit, so if the propellers suffer some catastrophic failure they're not flying at you. If you want something really stress-inducing, look at the IA 58 Pucará... That thing has the propellers almost grazing the canopy and in-line with the pilot. It was actually used as an example of "do not do this" in a conceptual aircraft design book I read a long time ago.
@Giantwhale I've been thinking about that since the update came out but I have a long list of other things I want to do first.
@ChisP Some of my other builds might have a thing or two to say about that, lol.
@teodor99 Thanks! "Funky Trees" is the name the devs gave to the new system implemented in 1.9 that essentially lets you write more advanced control inputs for parts like control surfaces, rotators, pistons, etc. In this case I used very basic ones for the instruments, and a far more headache-inducing one for the gunsight. Seeing for yourself is probably going to be better than me trying to explain.
@SnoWFLakE0s Absolutely no problem, the advice you did manage to give proved to be crucial.
As for the suggestion, that would indeed help in making it stand out, but as this is supposed to "emulate" a WWII-era collimator sight, realistically it'd all be the same color. I could indeed make it a very slight change, but for this next plane I'm already stranded on the color palette, lol. In any case, thanks a lot!
@Mustang51 Just to clear a doubt up, we've got until January 7 starts or until it ends? I ask because I'm making a third build and now that I fixed some of its problems I need to touch it up and write a description, lol. Not that it'd be a problem if I can't get it finished in time, two submissions is already a lot and frankly more than I was expecting to do.
@SnoWFlakE0s I think I've figured out issue no. 1: my "Time" calculations appear to be messed up, lol. I'll re-do them, use your clamp advice and see if it works.
@SnoWFLakE0s My apologies for the late response, I was in fact not expecting such a quick reply, thank you for devoting a bit of your time and attention for this. I have in fact already drawn a diagram, it was the first thing I did while trying to piece this thing together lel. It's absolutely vital to sketch things prior to throwing yourself at them at least in my experience, I need that visual feedback. I'll be trying to take some good pictures of the sketches in the meantime. How would you prefer I send them to you? I don't think one can make an unlisted forum post, well in any case I could upload the system itself and its testbed plane with the pictures attached to the description.
Continuning, didn't realize the comment would be cut halfway through, my bad.
...which is expected.
So I'd like to ask if you would like to help me with this, or in case that isn't possible, perhaps a few pointers, as I am rather lost; in that case I'd make a post or something to send you the calculations I've done and the inputs I've tried to make - who knows, maybe one of my premises is wrong, I made a mistake somewhere along the calculations themselves or I have done them in a less than code-friendly way. I'm almost sure it's a mistake somewhere in the input statement itself, though. I basically wrote an equation and tried to "translate" it to the Funky Trees syntax; I have very little experience or knowledge in this area, I've done a little bit of Matlab for college about a year ago, but only basic stuff so far (they threw us in without even an introduction to coding) and given the amount of times I've sent things into infinite loops, I wouldn't exactly trust my skills there, lel.
Again, my sincere apologies for the trouble and for extending myself for so long. I had to ask because it's been boggling my mind quite a bit.
@SnoWFLakE0s First of all, I apologize for the extent of this post, but I'd like to ask for help with something, if it isn't too much trouble of course; it's a small thing, and not really necessary for the build I'm doing right now, I could do without it, it'd just be a nifty thing to have.
I've been trying to make a dive-bombing gunsight display, and while doing the calculations on paper is not a big problem, turning it into something that works in SimplePlanes has been an extremely confusing... experience so far. The basis of the equations isn't too different from what you did with your bombsight, it's still a bomb trajectory problem after all, but the system is different in that instead of a rotator turning at a given angle, it's a piston that pushes a "reticle" downwards in such a way that from the operator's view, when the bomb impact point crosses the target, the reticle will be seen on top of the target as well. This of course needs some extra angles to be calculated (as well as the distance from the cockpit to the "reticle" being known and input), but nothing too complicated, and then a tangent will finally give you the "x" distance the reticle needs to depress, with meters as the unit. Since piston travel distance "1" = 1 meter in my testing, this should be doable - at least in theory.
In practice, the piston always pushes the reticle up instead of down, no matter how many times I have selected "invert = true" or attempted to invert the input statement itself with minuses. This is the least of my problems though, as the piston seems to quickly try going to absurd values, even to the point of exceeding the piston travel distance of 1 meter by far, sometimes so violently it sends the plane into a spin on the pitch axis! It would be frankly hilarious to watch if it weren't frustrating.
I also intended to make it so the reticle would never go up, instead its maximum input would be 0 so it would always either rest at its central location or depress as the aircraft went into a dive - with its maximum depression (min input) also set so the reticle would never go below the sight's "collimator", in this case a very thin hollow fuselage, lol. Of course, the sight as of present doesn't even go down to begin with, so I have no way to properly test this but I'd like to know if it can be done. It doesn't seem to behave quite in the same manner as "normal" inputs would, though I've noted if I set both min and max to 0 it doesn't move at all, which is ex
@SnoWFLakE0s Oh, you mean a manual FCS, like those targeting tables used in WWI/WWII combat vessels? My brain kinda forgot these also count as FCS for a while, lol. Yeah, this could work, and a numerical display would indeed make its use a lot easier.
@SnoWFLakE0s Perhaps you could post it as an unlisted build (instead of public), and provide a link to it in your original post? It's what I do when I've got multiple variants of the same plane without much changing between them.
And you make me curious; do you something in mind for an FCS system? I'd think (in my infinite lack of creativity) it would be impossible to make one right now given you can't input any target data. If in the future we do get target data as inputs - range, bearing, and if they really want to go all out, relative velocity - then that would open up a lot of possibilities. FCS, automated gun turrets, RWR displays.
The new features are greatly appreciated, but I have noticed something which I have no idea whether it is simply an unavoidable consequence of these changes or a bug. Inputs of the kind "-LandingGear" no longer seem to work, having the same effect as "LandingGear" without the negative. I have only seen this behavior in beacon lights, so I don't know whether it's universal or simply a problem with the lights.
It's not a deal breaker for me since I only used these for cosmetics like landing gear lights and "LG down" warning lights in cockpits, but since this has the potential to affect a lot of previous builds I figured I should let people know, and see if someone else is also running into this problem. Of course, I'll be submitting a proper report too.
Absolutely glorious
@ChiChiWerx Yeah, I am painfully aware. In this case the goal was to hit Mach 1 at sea level clean, and Mach 2 at altitude; the external tanks have drag modelled in (though I probably should have used more, since if I'm not mistaken 50% of the extra fuel they add is used just to overcome the extra drag), but you are correct, the weapons don't (except for the bombs, and the missile parts inside the missiles themselves, which probably don't count since they're hidden in a shell). The reason why is because I've had very bad experiences with custom weapons with drag, as in, it'd affect their performance after firing and sometimes render them unstable or otherwise useless. I choose to make all my custom weapons dragless due to that.
Thank you once again for your continued patience and extended feedback!
@Sunrising The reason are probably the detachers on the custom missiles. Low physics will probably cause them to go boom indeed.
Now, even on high physics, this plane can blow up because of that as I've found out, but that requires you to climb to 40.000 feet, accelerate to +1200 mph and then command full pitch + full roll.
And yeah controlling this on a mobile device must be painful, lol. I admit that didn't even go through my mind, as I only use mouse.
The ultimate light fighter that never was. A build I'll be looking forward to, for sure.
@ChiChiWerx Oh yeah, I'm not too happy with that myself. I wanted to make it decently controllable at low speed but we don't have vortex modellation so I ended up with too much lift, not enough AoA to bleed energy and a plane that turns way too hard at speed. I decided to leave it as is, but yeah, it turns too much. It's interesting to fly this limiting yourself to a point where the AoA warning lights don't turn on, though.
Balancing a degree of realism and fun to fly is something I really aim for, and every bit of feedback I can get is extremely valuable, thank you!
@NUOB Unfortunately I don't have any mobile device I can test this on. However, my laptop is a potato and it can run this with almost no problem. I'd be grateful if someone could test it out for mobile devices.
That's an amazing amount of effort and well-done execution.
Handles better than I had expected! Very nice work. The cockpit with functional controls is pretty nice as well.
Handles like a dream, the cluster bombs are surprisingly fun to use and while they did lag my potato laptop a bit, it wasn't too much at all, even for this old 'tater! Absolutely magnificent build. I'm placing my chips on this one, haha
I've taken this out for a spin and I must say, it's an extremely underrated build. It's simple, no-nonsense, mobile friendly, and handles really well.
@Trainzo Thank you a lot, I'm honored! Most of the parts are in the custom weapons, they increased the part count a lot unfortunately.
Thanks for the spotlight, by the way! As you can see, the Mirage series was a big inspiration and basis for this.
I'll probably have an entry up soon if we still have a couple more hours. Just need to tweak the paint scheme.
I'm a simple man. I see Bronco vibes, I like.
@wonkapilot Haha, it's got a heck ton of lift doesn't it? The real hard thing is landing this thing with an engine out, though. I did the "mission" I laid out there several times, in one of them the ships shot one of my engines out. I flew back home on a single engine, but when I was approaching for landing I went too slow and my rudder started losing authority. Desperate, I throttled up - and the asymmetric thrust sent me in a flatspin to the ocean, lol.
@BlyatMan It's included with the plane, it's the weird pod attached under the fuselage's centreline pylon. You can grab it and turn it into a subassembly by removing it from its pylon, just make sure to give credit if you use the pod itself in another build.
@Shippy456 The best thing is the Brazilian designation for these things. Grenades... Hecking grenades, lmao.
This is a grenade launcher, apparently.
@sheepsblood I might have been the first, I don't know lol. In any case, I'd be really happy to see more people trying out systems like this one, it's really easy to do and fun to use.
@sheepsblood well, that's basically shat the Mehrzweckwaffe carried in German Tornados was... A bunch of very short-barreled, low-velocity guns shooting very unique shells, lel. Unfortunately, we cannot make these shells cylindrical and parachute-delayed, at least not just yet.
@UAVMaker there is this beautiful guide by Skua right here
@Roswell Glad you liked it! It's what I was aiming for, something that's fun to fly and turn around at low altitude.
@MontyPython You'll be lucky if fire is the only thing you get lmao
@XxMegamonsterxX Second time someone says that, but funny thing, I had to google what that meant, lmao. I'm an uncultured man, never read that book or any of the movies. I was trying to figure out how to make a Southern Cross (best constellation btw) reference without being too obvious. Guess I failed miserably lmao
@Mustang51 Is it? I figured someone must have already tried it lel, it was the first thing that came to mind when I was trying to figure out how to make a bomblet dispenser without needing 400 bomb parts lel.
There are some quirks to figure out, sometimes the explosions will send unexploded shells flying towards you, particularly in slow motion, and cause significant emotional events. Still, I found it pretty fun to mess around with and decided to share it, glad you liked it!
Now that's one plane you don't see very often! Beautiful rendition of this magnificent Marcel Dassault piece.
@Z3RO Absolutely. It looks insanely cool too, sadly I wasn't able to reeally replicate the looks or feel of the weapon but I tried my best lel.
@Mitchellwi Yeah, it wasn't my intention to submit it into the challenge (as said in the first line of the description). This is based on the plane I submitted back then, and I forgot to erase the URL from the .xml file.
Let me tell you a story, back when I was just a gunnery officer...
An unguided rocket with a scaled bomb that doesn't go haywire on launch? Man, I needed this in my life! My attempts to do something like this previously have all resulted in the rocket going absolutely bonkers as soon as it's fired.
@Mustang51 Lol, no need man. I'm already more than happy with just having taken part on it.
This has got to be the best challenge I've participated in so far, and certainly the one with the highest quantity of amazing builds! I had a great deal of fun with this one, and the winners are indeed well deserved. That Martin Mauler caught my eye as soon as I saw it, man, those dive brakes.
@Zanedavid Thanks! Yeah, I should probably have set them a bit further apart, but look on the bright side - they're in front of the cockpit, so if the propellers suffer some catastrophic failure they're not flying at you. If you want something really stress-inducing, look at the IA 58 Pucará... That thing has the propellers almost grazing the canopy and in-line with the pilot. It was actually used as an example of "do not do this" in a conceptual aircraft design book I read a long time ago.
@Ardanikova yes
I haven't even used 50% of my power yet
@Giantwhale I've been thinking about that since the update came out but I have a long list of other things I want to do first.
@ChisP Some of my other builds might have a thing or two to say about that, lol.
@BACconcordepilot Not on my watch
Wait, this got featured? Now there's something I wasn't expecting! Thanks, mods!
@teodor99 Thanks! "Funky Trees" is the name the devs gave to the new system implemented in 1.9 that essentially lets you write more advanced control inputs for parts like control surfaces, rotators, pistons, etc. In this case I used very basic ones for the instruments, and a far more headache-inducing one for the gunsight.
Seeing for yourself is probably going to be better than me trying to explain.
@SnoWFLakE0s Absolutely no problem, the advice you did manage to give proved to be crucial.
As for the suggestion, that would indeed help in making it stand out, but as this is supposed to "emulate" a WWII-era collimator sight, realistically it'd all be the same color. I could indeed make it a very slight change, but for this next plane I'm already stranded on the color palette, lol. In any case, thanks a lot!
Holy moly, this is absolutely jaw-dropping. Massive T .
@Mustang51 Most excellent! Mind if I ask you what your timezone is again? I don't expect to take that long, but who knows, lel
@MrPorg137 Thanks, man!
@Mustang51 Just to clear a doubt up, we've got until January 7 starts or until it ends? I ask because I'm making a third build and now that I fixed some of its problems I need to touch it up and write a description, lol. Not that it'd be a problem if I can't get it finished in time, two submissions is already a lot and frankly more than I was expecting to do.
@SnoWFlakE0s I think I've figured out issue no. 1: my "Time" calculations appear to be messed up, lol. I'll re-do them, use your clamp advice and see if it works.
Great looking! Very smooth shape and unique design.
@SnoWFLakE0s My apologies for the late response, I was in fact not expecting such a quick reply, thank you for devoting a bit of your time and attention for this. I have in fact already drawn a diagram, it was the first thing I did while trying to piece this thing together lel. It's absolutely vital to sketch things prior to throwing yourself at them at least in my experience, I need that visual feedback. I'll be trying to take some good pictures of the sketches in the meantime. How would you prefer I send them to you? I don't think one can make an unlisted forum post, well in any case I could upload the system itself and its testbed plane with the pictures attached to the description.
Continuning, didn't realize the comment would be cut halfway through, my bad.
...which is expected.
So I'd like to ask if you would like to help me with this, or in case that isn't possible, perhaps a few pointers, as I am rather lost; in that case I'd make a post or something to send you the calculations I've done and the inputs I've tried to make - who knows, maybe one of my premises is wrong, I made a mistake somewhere along the calculations themselves or I have done them in a less than code-friendly way. I'm almost sure it's a mistake somewhere in the input statement itself, though. I basically wrote an equation and tried to "translate" it to the Funky Trees syntax; I have very little experience or knowledge in this area, I've done a little bit of Matlab for college about a year ago, but only basic stuff so far (they threw us in without even an introduction to coding) and given the amount of times I've sent things into infinite loops, I wouldn't exactly trust my skills there, lel.
Again, my sincere apologies for the trouble and for extending myself for so long. I had to ask because it's been boggling my mind quite a bit.
@SnoWFLakE0s First of all, I apologize for the extent of this post, but I'd like to ask for help with something, if it isn't too much trouble of course; it's a small thing, and not really necessary for the build I'm doing right now, I could do without it, it'd just be a nifty thing to have.
I've been trying to make a dive-bombing gunsight display, and while doing the calculations on paper is not a big problem, turning it into something that works in SimplePlanes has been an extremely confusing... experience so far. The basis of the equations isn't too different from what you did with your bombsight, it's still a bomb trajectory problem after all, but the system is different in that instead of a rotator turning at a given angle, it's a piston that pushes a "reticle" downwards in such a way that from the operator's view, when the bomb impact point crosses the target, the reticle will be seen on top of the target as well. This of course needs some extra angles to be calculated (as well as the distance from the cockpit to the "reticle" being known and input), but nothing too complicated, and then a tangent will finally give you the "x" distance the reticle needs to depress, with meters as the unit. Since piston travel distance "1" = 1 meter in my testing, this should be doable - at least in theory.
In practice, the piston always pushes the reticle up instead of down, no matter how many times I have selected "invert = true" or attempted to invert the input statement itself with minuses. This is the least of my problems though, as the piston seems to quickly try going to absurd values, even to the point of exceeding the piston travel distance of 1 meter by far, sometimes so violently it sends the plane into a spin on the pitch axis! It would be frankly hilarious to watch if it weren't frustrating.
I also intended to make it so the reticle would never go up, instead its maximum input would be 0 so it would always either rest at its central location or depress as the aircraft went into a dive - with its maximum depression (min input) also set so the reticle would never go below the sight's "collimator", in this case a very thin hollow fuselage, lol. Of course, the sight as of present doesn't even go down to begin with, so I have no way to properly test this but I'd like to know if it can be done. It doesn't seem to behave quite in the same manner as "normal" inputs would, though I've noted if I set both min and max to 0 it doesn't move at all, which is ex
@SnoWFLakE0s Oh, you mean a manual FCS, like those targeting tables used in WWI/WWII combat vessels? My brain kinda forgot these also count as FCS for a while, lol. Yeah, this could work, and a numerical display would indeed make its use a lot easier.
@SnoWFLakE0s Perhaps you could post it as an unlisted build (instead of public), and provide a link to it in your original post? It's what I do when I've got multiple variants of the same plane without much changing between them.
And you make me curious; do you something in mind for an FCS system? I'd think (in my infinite lack of creativity) it would be impossible to make one right now given you can't input any target data. If in the future we do get target data as inputs - range, bearing, and if they really want to go all out, relative velocity - then that would open up a lot of possibilities. FCS, automated gun turrets, RWR displays.
How did I not know about this yet? Fantastic build of a legendary car.